ABOUT THIS ALBUM

Album Notes

Brother Dege's Folk Songs of the American Longhair is a tour de force artwork that brings it all back home to the Deep South like the possessed incarnation of Robert Johnson and Son House. This is the REAL deal. Dege Legg (aka Brother Dege), the Cajun born and Louisiana raised leader of the band Santeria, recorded the album in a shed behind his house in southern Louisiana. Co-produced by by 4x Grammy-winner Tony Daigle (Dr. John, Sonny Landreth, Gatemouth Brown, Bobby Charles), Santeria lead-guitarist Primo and Legg, Folk Songs of the American Longhair set the new bar for the next 100 years of slide-based Delta blues.

Legg composed ten original tunes in the slide-Delta tradition, painstakingly paying tribute to the old masters while tossing all purist, karaoke-like tendencies to the wind. Think Son House meets Leonard Cohen at a hoodoo séance in the swamps. Slide players from the U.S. to Europe are already covering the tunes - and the record isn't even out yet - via a series of live Brother Dege youtube videos which have garnered over 150,000 plays with no promotional hype or jive.

Much like the field recordings of Alan Lomax, the record tunnels into the ancient mysteries of pre-war blues and the devil-obsessed masters. Recorded in sheds, old houses and open fields for maximum intensity. There’s minimal instrumentation on this thing. In a return to the unprocessed basics, almost all of the tracks feature only one vocal, one slide guitar and one foot stomping. That’s it. Listeners are in for a treat when they hear how the music sounds, writhing about in the echo chamber of reality when stripped of all the studio trickery of the past decade.